Take this story at The Inquirer with a grain of salt as the source might just have a bit of an axe to grind with their former employer; regardless it makes for an interesting read. The idea that Jen-Hsun’s desire to be top boss of the company that absorbed the one he was running at the time certainly fits the personality he shows publicly. Then again Hector lasted a mere 2 years after the purchase of ATI so perhaps a change in leadership at that time would have changed AMD’s future somewhat. ATI could still be around and AMD might be more focused on SoC and HPC as opposed to the APU route they took.
"CHIP DESIGNER AMD wanted to cut a deal with Nvidia before settling for buying ATI instead, according to former AMD employees.
AMD completed a deal to buy ATI for $5.4bn in 2006, but only after it couldn’t agree on terms with Nvidia, according to former AMD employees interviewed by Forbes. One of the stumbling blocks to the deal was Nvidia’s colourful CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wanting to become the CEO of the combined company, effectively ousting then AMD CEO Hector Ruiz."
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That is such BS. They did not
That is such BS. They did not have the money to buy Nvidia plus Nvidia is very independent and does not want to be bought otherwise, Intel would have bought them. Plus Intel and ATI had a great relationship.
I’d like to see if anyone
I’d like to see if anyone could prove this to be true, even back then nVidia was worth more than ATI, I doubt AMD could to buy nVidia.
While most people are not a fan of Jen-Hsun, I think he would probably make a better CEO than the leadership AMD has had since the AMD-ATI merger. you just have to look at the last line of the article ‘Nvidia now has a market capitalization of $9.7 billion. AMD is worth just $5.2 billion.’
Back then NVIDIA and AMD were
Back then NVIDIA and AMD were roughly equivalent sizes (and ATI was tiny) — so a merger (not a buyout) wouldn’t have been out of the question. Hence — the discussion about Jen-Hsun becoming CEO of AMD/nVidia.
That’s not to say that I believe the story but it seems plausible to me that AMD would approach them to merge, that NVIDIA would drive a hard bargain, be difficult to do business with, and ultimately break the deal. Seems pretty characteristic.